The pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow praised this with the catchphrase “The Old Testament of the Piano Players”. “Well-Tempered Clavier” Johann Sebastian Bach’s pearl necklace of 24 preludes and fugues through all major and minor keys. The pious seal of quality from the 19th century has retained its credibility, as has Bülow’s addition that the “New Testament” is Ludwig van Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. It may be strange, and disturbing for some, that Bach probably began composing his cycle of keys in a Weimar prison cell, where he was imprisoned for a month in the autumn of 1717. The room is still in the City Palace in Weimar and can be viewed. But of that later.
The year was 1722 when Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750), then conductor at the small court of Prince Leopold in Köthen in Anhalt and not yet Thomaskantor in Leipzig, completed the “Well-Tempered Clavier”. His Thuringian home town of Eisenach is now taking the centenary date seriously and is presenting it in the Bach House Memorial a two-part special exhibition entitled: “The Old Testament of the Piano Players”, which runs until November 6th. We are talking about the first volume of the cycle, two decades later Bach thought through and composed the project again alternatively. Jörg Hansen, director of the Bachhaus and curator of the exhibition, wants to document the key compendium and its origins in a very brief and concise manner, showing at least the beginnings of the historical and theoretical problems. The focus is on the difficult questions about the old tuning of the piano keys.
The speculative circumstances of the idea for the work fill the first space. Basically, the form and structure of the “Well-Tempered Clavier” is child’s play: the chromatic scale is visible on every piano keyboard, from C, through C#, D, D# to B. Bach devotes two pairs of “preludes and fugues” to each note in ascending order, the first in major, the second in minor, making a total of 24 pairs. However, for Bach to be able to perform the movements cleanly in the different keys, the prerequisite was that the phenomenon of the unclean pitches, which were still widespread at the time, such as the mean tone mood had to be eliminated.
Bach probably used a new type of tuning to get through all keys well
The meantone tuning turned every keyboard instrument into an adventure playground. The Eisenach exhibition demonstrates this in texts, color assignments, drawings and with apparatus: Up until the 17th century, only 14 tones were considered to be halfway playable because they could be heard. All the others that were further away from C, such as the exotic B minor or F sharp major, seemed increasingly out of tune, askew and crooked. There have been many attempts at correction in music history to compensate for this colorful deficiency. With the help of an electronic piano keyboard, the visitor can experiment with the sound deviations of some historical tuning systems.
An organist in Halberstadt named Andrew Werckmeister then in 1691 presented his system of equal temperament for keyboard instruments, in which he divided the scale on the keyboard into twelve equal semitones. This results in the well-tempered sound found on every Steinway today, albeit more smoothly mechanized than lively, breathing. The impure intervals thus became the normalized “pure”. Presumably Bach used such a well-tempered system to get through all keys well.
With the preludes and fugues, Bach vehemently secured the possibility of composing in all keys evenly, above all of combinatorially modulating the keys within individual pieces. The exhibition demonstrates that post-Bach composers used the cycle of musical invention not just as a schematic textbook but, thanks to Bach’s musical genius, as a marvel of logical thinking and poetic fantasizing in tones. Ludwig van Beethoven more than hinted at this in his famous bon mot: “Not Bach! It should be called Meer: because of its infinite, inexhaustible wealth of tone combinations and harmonies.”
The second room reflects all of this in image, text and sound. A plaque asks: “Do keys have a character?” This was discussed early on, for Bach’s contemporary of music theory Johann Mattheson, C major was “quite rude and cheeky”, but B minor was “bizarre, unfunny, melancholic”. The Eisenach show also wants to make the associations of tones with colors recognizable. Isaac Newton’s color-tone mapping in his treatise “optics” from 1704 is present in the illustrated color wheel by the Bauhaus master Johannes Itten.
The exhibition can only hint at the discographic reception history of the “Well-Tempered Clavier”.
The whole of the second room is a bar-equipped, symbolically ironic reminiscence of Bach’s Weimar prison cell. Behind the bars on the walls are lined up the portraits of those composers who implicitly confirm the outstanding importance of the “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Jörg Hansen is of the justified opinion that Bach’s most influential and momentous inventions were not the “St Matthew Passion”, the “Christmas Oratorio” or the “Goldberg Variations”, but rather the preludes and fugues of the “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Mozart and Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and Schumann, also Gounod, also Tchaikovsky and Scriabin, Shostakovich and Hindemith, also the two female composers Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann – they all dealt with Bach’s great textbook by playing from it and making it productive collected. Not to mention the millions and millions of music students and classical music fans in three hundred years. Headphones dangle from the bars, in which Bach’s music can be heard.
The exhibition can only hint at the discographic reception history of the “Well-Tempered Clavier”. For example the beginnings: in the display case is the album by the pianist Edwin Fischer, filled to the brim with 21 shellac records, the first recording on the modern grand piano from the 1930s. And of course the first complete harpsichord recording by the legendary Wanda Landowska is present.
Thuringia is Bach country, Leipzig is still far away for Bach. If you drive from Eisenach to Weimar on the country road, you will come to the town of Ohrdruf. Bach, who was orphaned at the age of ten, spent five years of his youth here with his much older brother, the organist Johann Christoph Bach. The great early apprenticeship. The brilliantly renovated castle documents the cultural history of the time that was formative for the young Bach in refreshed exhibition rooms.
Finally, in the Weimar City Palace, the Bastille with the detention cell that remained on the construction site. Bach’s contemporary Ernst Ludwig Gerber made the grandiose assumption that Bach was only able to invent his piano cycle here, “in a place where displeasure, boredom and a lack of any kind of musical instruments made this pastime necessary for him”. The historical fact: Johann Sebastian Bach, 32 years young, wanted to quit his service in Weimar in 1717 and go to Köthen as court music director, eagerly awaited by Prince Leopold. The Weimar employer Duke Wilhelm Ernst does not let him go and gives him a month in prison. Such a prison cell, visited by the woman once a week, is not the worst place to develop what the musician Johann Nepomuk David, the teacher of the composer Helmut Lachenmann, attributed in 1962 to a fugue from the “Well-Tempered Clavier” and with it of the sheer philosophical art of Bach in general: “Here all possibilities of thinking about an object are tested, exhausted and carried up to the point of quiet jubilation. But there is no talking, only thinking.”